This Week in Startups - Spotify's ad-tech acquisitions to take on YouTube with The Verge's Ashley Carman + Founder University Pitches | E1389

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Ashley Carman joins Jason & Molly to discuss Spotify's acquisition of podcast ad-tech companies Chartable and Podsights (1:55). Ashley is a senior reporter at The Verge and the lead writer at HotPod. We dig into why she thinks Spotify's main competition is YouTube and how the Big Tech and Big Media podcasting efforts are playing out.  After that, 10 companies pitch Jason and the team in rapid-fire (46:16). These startups went through Founder University, a 12-week course run by the team at Launch. 0:00 Jason and Molly tee up today’s topics: Spotify’s podcasting ambitions with Ashley Carman PLUS 10 founder pitches from Founder University 1:55 Ashley Carman joins to break down the news: Spotify acquires Chartable and Podsights, she also covers what happened to Clubhouse 13:25 Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist 14:29 What podcasting loses by going with dynamically inserted ads, building for creators vs. building for established brands, Spotify going after YouTube as the main platform for creators 26:45 Linode - Apply to their Rise program for founder-led, early-stage startups and get 3 years of discounts at https://linode.com/twist. 27:52 Podcast tracking users habits, why Spotify is rejecting open standards, sleeping giants in the podcasting space 37:01 Mercury - Banking built for startups. See more at https://mercury.com/twist 38:26 Reflecting on Lumiary’s big bet to be the HBO of podcasting 46:16 First 5 pitches: Giphting, Chojuu, TaCo, Term Payments, Fix6 PLUS judge feedback 1:02:05 5 Next 5 pitches: Remotespace. SavvyTeam, Gaan, Timewell, Innocuous AI PLUS judge feedback FOLLOW Ashley: https://twitter.com/ashleyrcarman Check out Founder University: https://www.founder.university Companies Pitching: Giphting, Chojuu, TaCo, Term Payments, Fix6, Remotespace, SavvyTeam, Gaan, Timewell, Innocuous AI FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, everybody, we have a really fun combo for you today. First up, the Verges, Ashley Carman is back on the program today. She's not talking about Clubhouse, but she's talking about Spotify acquiring charitable and pod sites. Yeah, we're geeking out big time on the podcasting industry because Spotify has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on acquisitions in podcasting over the past few years. So we dig into Spotify's grand vision, how this industry is changing and how YouTube could change the game even more. And then we have a couple of the best pitch. from the founder university's first class of graduates. If you don't know, founder dot university, that's the domain name.

There's a dot university domain now. It's a 12-week course. It's free. We had 100 people start the course. I think 92 finished it. And then we asked the people, we asked the folks running the program, hey, what were some of the best pitches? And we met with those companies.

And we're going to share with you 10 of the best nascent pitches. These are very early companies. and you'll see myself, Molly Wood, and Jackie, who is one of our managing directors here, and Mike Savino, see the pitches, ask questions, and rate which ones were their favorite. It's going to be a great episode. Stick with us. This weekend startups is brought to you by Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-CROWD.com slash Twist. Linode's startup program is built specifically for founder-led early stage startups.

It's called Rise, and it comes with a three-year discount program and tech consultants to help with infrastructure growth. Apply today at linode.com slash twist and Mercury. Question, how much time have you wasted managing your company's money? Answer, too much. Switch to Mercury at Mercury.com. All right. We're going to get to the news with some help. today. Spotify has acquired chartable and pod sites, which means that Spotify is getting even more heavily into the measurement

and ads product game. And, you know, becoming a little bit of a black hole for sucking in all of the parts of the podcasting business. So today, we're excited because we have a guest to help us talk about it. Ashley Carmen is a senior reporter at the verge, the lead writer at the Hot Pod newsletter.

And she is here to help us talk about this today. Ashley, welcome back. to the program, you were on episode 1292 talking to me about Clubhouse and the monetization problems back in the day. Yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Finger on the pulse. Different era.

Let me ask you a question before we get to the Spotify. When's the last time you participated in Clubhouse? Is Clubhouse dying here in the United States? Here's doing great overseas in some places, but all I see as a Twitter user is all that crypto grift and people talking about NFTs is all over Twitter spaces. and then all those tech conversations are on Twitter spaces. So I'm wondering what's left on Clubhouse. Is it just multi-level marketing and shoot your shop rooms?

Yeah, I really don't. I do force myself to check in every once in a while of my job requires and for work. I don't see much happening there. I do believe internationally it could be big, but I don't really speak any other languages. Get a little Spanish. But, you know, the countries that it might be big in like India or something, or China or anywhere in Asia, So, like, I can't really assess what's happening there. It really is fascinating.

Yeah, it's so interesting. And also kind of a bummer because it seemed like for a minute there, Clubhouse had really become like a black creator hangout, right? It was really becoming like the sort of a cultural movement. It had been really embraced by black entrepreneurs. And there was just a lot happening there that wasn't happening on any other platform. Like, do you think that all went away too? I'm sure there's some community still there.

but it was funny because my colleague at the verge, Casey Newton, was like, all that clubhouse needed to have happen is Twitter continue as it always has and not do anything new. And then Twitter, of course, actually did something with spaces, or yeah, with spaces and kind of ate clubhouse's lunch. I think that's the right observation.

For many years, people were able to take the Twitter social graph and use Twitter's feed as a way to promote new products. And Twitter just sat there and watched it. And this was like the one time. acted quickly to take a threat that was basically copying. I mean, your whole Twitter graph was just getting rebuilt over there and they stopped it. So that is a, maybe that's a sign that there's just additional confidence on a technical basis, on a product basis, at Twitter over the last few years, which I think is true.

New CEO, who this? Yeah, we'll see. And the other observation I had there was I think Clubhouse really suffered in a way from, and this kind of is a little esoteric, but I do this. think the public is aware of the valuation of companies. And I do think that that absurd valuation, especially with those lead users, the people you're mentioning, Molly, you know, a lot of the black community, I heard so much back channel like, we built this. It's worth $4 billion. So here we go again, a social network built off black culture or another business by two white guys built off black culture.

I hate to make it a race issue. Not everything is. But I, in this case, specifically heard, from tons of black creators, and there were rooms like, what do we get out of this? And then I think, Andreessen, running that valuation up so quickly just felt like, is that artificial or real? And it just put this whole thing of like, I'm not getting paid for this. And that's what I kept hearing. Everybody's getting rich on this. I'm not getting paid for this.

And I think that created a lot of weird tension in the platform. I don't know if you guys witnessed that as well. And then there was other weird thing. And Drason Horowitz was like the top users on the platform. and so for the VCs to be the top users, and then the VC stopped using it. And they may let it get a little ugly in there, if we're being honest.

Well, they also stopped, yeah, things got a little weird, and then they stopped using it. So it was like, okay, so Mark and Dresen and Ben Horowitz are the big draw, and then they're not there anymore. And then I guess Ben's wife was, Felicia was doing like a Saturday thing,

which was the big tent pole every Saturday, and then they all just abandoned it. It's very weird. Life got busy again. That too. Could be that, yeah. I mean, just. Yeah.

For founders out there, don't look to your celebrity VCs. It's me saying that. Like one of the original celebrity VCs? Jason, that can't help you. Well, I mean, you have to build your business on your own. Yeah, I mean, the business has to be, you can use your VC to get the first thousand customers or, you know, just on the margins help. But it has to be sustainable in and of itself. And I think that was one of the also problems.

If you have Mark and Drason calling in favors with top flight people and then, they give up. All of a sudden, you lost your marketing department. So anyway. So tell us about what's, what's Spotify doing here in terms of buying charitable, which I use, which seems to be like a database of the rankings in a way to do podcast discovery across both ranking lists, but I don't know what else they do and this other analytics platform. What's the background here? Yeah. So just to back up a little bit, Spotify's been making a ton of acquisitions in podcasting. I'm sure you've talked about it a bunch on the show, but like just quick, quick recap. They've invested in networks.

So like Gimlet, the Ringer, Parcast. Obviously, they're investing in exclusives, which they're licensing, like Joe Rogan and Jack Shepard. They invested in a hosting platform called Megaphones. You can actually host the content. They invested in a creator platform called Anchor. They invested in an ad, like building an entire programmatic ad marketplace, which is part of Megaphone.

And then they recently, yeah, just made this acquisition of PodSites and Chartable. And the fact that you use Chartable, Jason, is like, It says a lot because basically every podcaster uses one of these two services, if not both. And really what they do is they use different tags in podcasts to help you attribute different behavior. So in Charitable's case, they're really well known for their smart promos and smart links technology, which is essentially like, if I run marketing somewhere, I want to know that someone's actually listening to my podcast from my banner ad or whatever it is.

So they have a way to use their tag system to actually determine that and tell you for sure your marketing's working. Pot sites does something similar with advertising, which is like if I'm an advertiser, I want to know that the listeners are hearing my ad. So once again, you can put a pixel on your website, which will then refer back to this tag. And the advertisers can know, oh, like, Ashley listened. They won't know me specifically, but this listener listened to our ad. She visited our website from it. And this is super important for any company that wants to actually build a huge advertising apparatus like Spotify does for podcasting. So I mean, this was the thing that like, enabled the modern podcasting boom and didn't exist for so long.

I mean, we're going to talk about Apple and Google later, but it's a huge deal, right? I mean, it's sort of like it sounds esoteric, but first of all, when you list off all of those properties all at once, it's sort of like, we've seen it in dribs and drabs, right? And they're like not even done. This is a huge deal. It's a very big deal. Simply because, you know, we're seeing this huge gold rush in podcasting.

And most of these companies like Amazon, who bought, has bought a lot as well, and Spotify and potentially others, see potential here for the advertising, the advertising money. And you can't get advertising money and scale and grow if advertisers don't believe that they actually get anything out of advertising. So you need this attribution, and these are the two big players that do that. Yeah, and Spotify's worth $30 billion to put it in context. These are all very modest acquisitions.

I mean, it was the biggest one the ringer maybe at $200 or so? I'm not sure what Anchor went for but these all seem to be in the low nine figures and they didn't announce the price of these two, correct? No, not yet. Not yet. And if they are, Molly, I think when a public company buys stuff if it's under like 50 million,

they don't even have to tell anybody, right? So they're probably not going to even do it. So I guess for podcasters, this means you got to take Spotify seriously as a distribution channel. They're really committed to it. Therefore, podcasters at least need to start sharing their URLs on Spotify

and maybe climbing up the rankings there. Yeah, it sort of is unclear right now if, like, for example, you can use Chartable without having to have a Spotify account, obviously. So it's unclear if they're going to lock all this technology down to their hosting platform. Spotify did tell me today that to use Chartable, you're going to need a megaphone login at their hosting platform. You don't have to be paying, but you need to have an account. So we can already see a little bit of hints of this.

To use chartable, their technology going forward. Wow. So you can see a little hint of it. Pod sites, it seems like it's going to be business as usual there for now. That's one though that it's a little unclear. Like if they end up being like, yeah, you have to host on our platform to use this, then yeah, that changes the game significantly. That's a big deal because a lot of businesses, even really, really big podcasting businesses, use charitable to get their data.

Right? And if all of a sudden it's like, you have to have this account, you're in their ecosystem, they're gathering data about what is now effectively a competitive product. Every podcast on Earth that isn't from Spotify just became a competitive product and they want you to log in to get at Insight data. I mean, again,

like it just we need to just because it can sound a little boring or a little esoteric if you're not in this business, it's a, it's a big deal. Because there aren't how many of these products that exist, right? Right. And there has to be trust. And I think that's the other big question is like, do we trust that's pod sites is going to respect the data and not share it with Spotify's publishing team, for example, because it would give them information on how well shows perform, how much advertisers are buying on it, all sorts of data. Yeah, I've had these conversations with Daniel over there and the CEO of Anchor because we are part of their video trial with this weekend startups and all in. and so they were like, I was like,

here's the RSS feed for video. And they're like, no, you got to have an anchor one. And I was like, no, I don't. And they're like, yeah, you kind of do. And I was like, why are you breaking the podcast standards? And they're like, we're fully committed to podcast standards. And I said, don't break them. Like, why do I have to have two, I don't want an anchor account.

I have, we publish our own RSS feed. And I said, and I literally told him an email. I was like, Daniel on this. I was like, this is why you guys have a bad reputation in podcasting is because you do stuff like this. Like, just respect the RSS feeds. It's that easy. He's like, we're going to. And I'm like, well, then do it now.

And they're like, no, for the trial, we're going to do it this way. And I was like, fine, we'll create another RSS feed. But I was really upset about it because if, and I'll just just open message to Daniel and to anybody in podcasting, you know, we built this. Great that you're supporting it. Great that you're bringing customers to it. Really appreciate it. Like if Spotify didn't have podcasts, that would be a bummer, right? It's great that they're putting all these podcasts in front of people next to their music listening.

It's a gift to podcasters. But also, and as a. Molly would say, and we were here first, don't break it. And I have a line in the sand. I don't want our users trapped, period. It's time for another Our Crowd Deal of the Week. Right now, you can join Our Crowd's investment in Future Family. According to the deal memo, Future Family provides millions of families with access to affordable treatment through by now pay later financing or BNPL.

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So if you're an accredited investor, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR, CROWD.com slash Twist, and review the current deals. That's OurCrow.com slash Twist to sign up for free. And I think live red ads is the magic of podcasting. I think for the long tele-podcasting, these inserted dynamically ads that are all ROI-driven, perfect. But for the high-end folks, and I'm curious what you think, it's not about the attribution as much as it is, hey, can I get Kara Swisher or Molly or Jason

or Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro, whoever it is, call her daddy, and can we get alignment with that host to read the ad? And we kind of know the audience, we know Joe Rogan's audience, we know This Weekend's audience, we know this week's startups audience kind of baked into the content, right? If you're listening to Call Her Daddy,

you're into a certain amount of content that probably is different than this week in startups. It may not be too much overlap there. So what are your thoughts on the magic of host red ads in relation to these dynamic ads. I'm curious. Yeah, this is a huge, huge thing in the industry right now

because players like Spotify, to make back all the money they've invested, they need to scale their advertising and they need to get a ton of ads in as many shows as possible. And so, again, this kind of speaks to what you're talking about, which is like, do podcasts lose something when instead of hearing you read an ad for whatever it is,

I instead just hear like a random Bank of America ad inserted into the show at some point. There are a lot of people on both sides of this. And yeah, as far as attribution goes, like Rogan, for example, is known to really his listeners buy product. So in that case, you're right. The attribution in that case really isn't that important. And that's what podcasting was kind of built on,

is this direct response advertiser, the promo codes, the vanity URLs that we always think of. And that's how you got your attribution is you're like, I know that they're buying stuff. it's different when you're trying to, yeah, scale and put all these automatically inserted ads in where Bank of America is like, how do we know anyone actually visited us? Because it's not so much about you buying a Bank of America, whatever product. It's about you coming to our website, exploring, learning about us. And that's where these tags come in. Totally different worlds. And yeah, people have really strong feelings on both sides. What do you think, Molly? Well, what is the, I mean, I guess what I wonder is what is the promise for these small creations?

right. So Spotify is presumably pitching the acquisition of these tools as a value ad for podcasters who want to use the Spotify platform to build audience. Do you have any sense of whether that is going to work and has value for, you know, like what do we know what the revenue share looks like or do we know what value it actually brings to somebody who isn't already, you know, me and Jason or whatever. Well, no, yeah. For you, among wood. Yes, is a better way to put it. Yeah. Well, this actually speaks to what Jason was in the, talking about with the fact that you're participating in the video trial. Because I wrote a take earlier this morning that this whole acquisition is actually about

competing with YouTube. Spotify wants to compete with YouTube and YouTube is the creator's platform. That's where people go to upload their videos. If YouTube allowed you to also have your audio there and you could listen in the background for free and all your analytics for both your podcast, traditional audio listeners and video listeners were in one place and it's Google Analytics, game over. Programmatics are already happening there. So YouTube is ahead of the ball, even though they kind of haven't really done much here.

So Spotify now is building this video player that you're participating in. They are trying to recruit 50 million creators to the platform. That's their stated mission. They have creator technology and anchor. They're trying to launch programmatic like YouTube has with AdSense so that more people can make money on the platform. And that's what this purchase is about, is trying to make sure that they know these ads work, therefore they can help smaller creators monetize,

therefore these smaller creators come to the platform and use it maybe instead of YouTube. Yeah, this makes sense to me. Like, if you think about a YouTube creator, do they want to have an ad sales team? Do they want to send insertion orders? Do they want to, you know, write copy to do ad reads? I don't think they want to do that when they're starting their careers. So that is kind of the magic of YouTube. It's a really good point because on YouTube, you put a video up, you turn on monetization.

And if you hit a certain number of subscribers, I think they'll let you in the program and you're off to the races. So, yeah, this could be a long tale of Spotify and play. I like that as a concept. That's super interesting, yeah. Also, it is interesting that YouTube seems to have no idea that it's also an audio platform, you know? I think they know. I think they have a complicated issue, yeah, right? So they've made a couple moves this past in 2021 that are really interesting.

One is they hired their first dedicated podcast person. It sounds small, but that's like a big deal in our world. It's like they have a person. The big deal for us. Somebody in the building. Right. That's a big deal for us. And then the second thing that's maybe more interesting

is that in Canada, they made background listening free on YouTube music. Seemingly as like a trial experiment. Again, we're speculating here, but I would not be surprised if they're seeing what happens there and then going to make it free everywhere else. But they have to pay for that because they have a music license deal. And that's why. I think it's only for, yeah, certain things. regions. Yeah, but I mean, I know as a YouTube subscriber, I pay for the premium and whatever that is, and you should too, Molly, it's worth it. You don't see ads. And then when you put it in the background, you can keep listening. And I do listen to many times podcasts on YouTube. And I wonder if they could get around this music licensing issue. Because the reason they can't do in the background is so you don't, you know, all that copyrighted music on YouTube, all the music industry people claim those and they make the money off of it.

but they don't want, it's a different license and a different fee structure when you're Spotify and you can do the background. So YouTube doesn't want to trigger that for two billion people globally. That'd be a big price tag. Yeah. But what they could do is they could do a flag where you said if you upload something, I am a podcast channel. I certify, I do not have music in here. That's licensed music. And they could actually let people opt into that.

And then they'd have to train users at some things. But the way I knew they were getting more serious about podcasting at YouTube is when they added the 2X speed. I think that's when you know somebody actually understands podcasting behavior, because when you dip your toe into podcasting, people are like, where's the customizable settings? And you really need to set speed settings based on the hosts. So for like this week and startups, it's maybe 1.25, but you're not putting us on 2x. But if you're listening to some, you know, slow people, like you're going to put it on 2. I was really hoping for a name drop there. I was like,

I was going to, but I don't want to be cruel here. But some people talk really slow, Molly. Do you guys change your speed on YouTube? Have you done that? I do. Because I have to consume a lot. I'd rather read.

That's the one nice thing for me about YouTube is they have transcripts. Yep. Transcripts and captions are huge. Spotify can really make a dead there. I can skin so much easier than I can. So that's why I have to use a fast speed to try to just get through these podcasts as fast as possible. Look out otter.AI.

Spotify is going to acquire that next. Oh, no, don't even say that. I know, right? Like, I, but that's, okay, so. Yeah. Let's get to the, oh, no. People listening know what otter a high is. The people, right, exactly.

If you are a media person, otter.com. A.I. is like a real-time transcription service, and you can also use it for some basic audio editing. Like you can highlight and move step around and actually use it for it. It's wonderful. Descript. Descript. Yeah.

Like Descript, if you know that one. Yeah, our audio nerdery is showing here. Descript is a lot better than Otter. What's great about Otter AI is, I don't know if you've been in a Zoom room. Oh, it's Descript that does the basic audio edits. Sorry, Otter only transcribes. And I think plays back. But maybe I'm thinking of Descript also.

The thing that's interesting about Otter AI, I don't know, you guys who try this is you can integrate it with Zoom. So if you do a Zoom meeting and you want to have a transcript, it says making a real-time transcript. And like you can open off the other window and you see your transcript in real-time. It's pretty delightful. And it's getting, I don't know. What do you think, Ashley? You have, when you do a quote from a podcast, you have to check it, obviously, make sure it's correct.

But how accurate are transcripts now for journalists? I mean, Otter. Otter. I mean, 90. Yeah, it's up there. But there was actually just a piece published about this yesterday, about the risk to journalists who use Otter. Whole separate thing, whole other source of anxiety.

I shouldn't have brought it up because now they're going to definitely buy them and it's going to be ruined. So let's get to this idea that now, Spotify is the company that definitely buys your thing and ruins it. Because Nilai from The Verge had an interesting take on top of your tweet tweeted article yesterday, which was like, look, yes, it's concerning that Spotify is like sucking up all of the pieces of the podcast industry and potentially breaking standards along the way and sort of like owning every piece of it and ruining it. And it's all these things. But like, why haven't Google and Apple done anything? or much of anything in the last, let me think,

almost two decades of podcasting. I mean, it's a good question. Apple, for what it's worth, did launch subscriptions this year. Apple, though, if I understand their ambitions correctly, like Apple will never be in the advertising game for podcasts. Like, that's just not their thing. So I think they are making a play more for like,

hey, if you want to offer the best subscriptions or something, on the main podcast platform, you'll do it through us and we'll charge you to do that. Google, yeah, that's been a big mystery. And like I said, like we just got a YouTube podcast person late last year or so. I think Apple, I think the subscription thing is interesting. I heard some people are paying for it.

I asked my followers recently. Does anybody pay for anything? And a couple people mentioned podcasts they did pay for, like the Theranos one or something. So I think special series, like actually your series, Molly, like that you did with Public Radio, how we survived. Like I could see people buying the second season of that or buying like a companion, like get the first six episodes, the next six are paid. I can see people with the, you know, I don't know if you look at the top charts, but it feels like 20% of the top charts are crime podcasts. I guess people would pay for those too.

Apparently, yeah. But Apple, I think, will do, you know how they, in the app store, they do premium listing. So you do a search and they have like an ad up there. I think that business has done well for them. So I can see them doing that in podcasting. So like Overcasts let you buy like the tech category. We tested it and you know, whatever, you get 500 clicks a week or something. But imagine Apple when you went to the tech podcasts and you were on any tech podcast.

If you know, you did a search or in the directory and it said, oh, here's this week in startups, featured podcasts. And we paid whatever for that, a dollar a click. You would have a dogfight for people buying those because the top podcasts do generate a lot of revenue. I think anybody who's a podcaster who's listening, I think this is all great for people who are getting into podcasting. I think if you are a publisher in podcasting, you know, and you're at scale and you do it as a job and you're making over $100,000 a year,

you should not use any of these tools. You should invest in having a sales team. You should represent yourself and you should build direct relationships with all advertisers. Because if you're going to be a publisher, you've got to control your distribution, you've got to control your relationship with advertisers. you've got to control your relationship with customers.

And what these platforms do is they abstract you away from that. So you have to kind of do the anti-abstraction, which is collect emails, collect followers on multiple platforms, have direct relationships with advertisers, and, you know, build those deep relationships with customers. That's my secret to all of this, is you big a publishing as a three-legged stool or a four-legged stool. You have to have the talent. Molly and I are on the program, right? We work full-time for this company.

We're not like rented talking heads. We have direct relationships with all the things. advertisers and we build direct relations with consumers through live events and email. Those are the three things you have to do as a podcast. If you're doing one, two, or three of them, you're not going to have breakout success. You're not a very modest success. So this is, I don't know, I think this great that Spotify is this committed. I just want everybody to tell Spotify, open standards, every time you talk to them,

anytime they want to do stuff. Cloud infrastructure costs are one of the biggest expenses for startups. I see it. And there are also some of the most unpredictable. It's no wonder that. Many startups get lowered to the major cloud providers with the promise of free credits only to wind up locked into unpredictable cloud builds and outrageous costs. I see this all the time. Some startup.

We're looking at the P&Ls. Boom. 5K. 20K. Spikes. What's going on here? Oh, our cloud costs. We found out after.

Well, Linode is here to change the cloud journey for startups. How? Well, they provide predictable pricing and have industry leading pricing performance ratios. It's really simplified infrastructure. and of course 24-7, 365-day-a-year award-winning support. So, Linode has a startup program. It's called Rise. And it's built specifically for founder-led early-stage startups.

They're offering a three-year discount program and technology consultants to help guide you in your infrastructure journey. So apply to the Rise program today at Linode.com slash twist. L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash twist. And then I don't want users tracked. I don't want my users track. I don't want other users track. I find it creepy.

I don't want people knowing what podcasts I'm listening to. So I don't use podcasts for, I don't use Spotify for listening to podcasts. I use Overcast, which actually takes it really seriously. Overcast removed all the pixels from the description page. So the way they do this is in your descriptions,

you're supposed to put the tags in there. So when you pop open that pixel, it's a little wonky here. Each pixel is unique. It tells the server, okay, this phone picked this little tiny pixel. And Overcast, which is my favorite podcast player, then Apples, then Spotify's, Overcast takes those out.

So I suggest everybody download Overcast and support Overcast and independent players as well. The Overcast Founder was on episode 1096, by the way, apparently. Oh, Marco, yeah. Look at Nick. Just boom. I mean, that's going to be the one that's going to be interesting. I could see them trying to buy Overcast. And do you use Overcast, Ashley, at all?

My boyfriend does. He loves Overcast. He's like a power, power user. What does he like about it? Does he tell you why he's so addicted to it? Doesn't it remove like the ums and all the filler words? They have something called smart speed. So there is a button you compress and it will compress empty space and make a podcast

15 or 20% faster. Really? Yeah, that's pretty cool. Smart speed is awesome. And then they have another thing called voice boost. voice boost, just, you know how sometimes podcasts, people talk low, and if you press the voice issue, it just raises the level of, you know, whatever the wave signal is of people's voices. It goes just a little bit hotter, which can be hit or miss, I'll be honest.

And then the other thing is custom speed. So you have a speed that you play all podcasts on. Mine's like 1.5. And then if I'm listening to Ben Shapiro, which I do once in a while just to hear like his wacky craziness, I'll put that on 1.2. and then other people who are slow, I'll put it on 1.8. And you can actually make the speed setting custom to the podcast. And then you can make a list of podcasts.

So I have a list of podcasts of thinkers, tech, and capital allocators. So sometimes I want to geek out to capital allocators. I'll just listen to all the capital allocator, you know, finance people's podcasts. Damn. It's the ultimate. I cannot say enough about overcast. And then I think there's a little, you know, that little speed player where you can fast forward 30 seconds or rewind 30 seconds. YouTube has added that to the app for premium users.

So you can actually do the 30 second fast forward. That's the other way, you know, somebody's taking their podcasting app seriously is they put the fast forward 15, 30 seconds in. My prediction, this is just a total prediction, is Spotify will remove the skip 30 second button. Mm-hmm. I have been wondering about that also

because advertisers obviously, I mean, spent decades suing DVR makers over exactly the, this issue. And I was wondering the same thing, especially now that they, I mean, again, Spotify by consolidating so much by buying and choosing and publishing its own content, by owning the tools, like puts itself in a position where it's going to increasingly have to make decisions probably that are a little unfriendly to consumers who are just like, I want to, I want to dumb pipe. Like Spotify is no longer a dumb pipe. Well, and like just with someone like Rogan, if you want to

listen to Rogan, maybe you don't want to hear the ads. you want to skip them. But if Spotify gets rid of that skip ad function, where else are you going to go to get Rogan? Exactly. It's like Hulu. I don't know if you guys use Hulu, but I bought Hulu with ad-free,

and then certain networks can override that. And it's just so oppressive that you can't go backwards in a sports game. And I'm like, just tell me what the number is. Please, Hulu. I don't want. Whatever it is. Whatever it is. And then they put it in yellow,

and it's like you're stuck in this yellow zone. of like, you know, two minutes of ads. It's just... Here's what I really want to know, though, and I'm assuming that the answer is no, but does anybody here use Amazon for podcasts? And more importantly, does it... Yeah, Amazon bought...

So Amazon is trying to, like, very quietly and with not, apparently not much consumer success, do Spotify things, right? They acquired Wondery, which is a big production studio. They've been acquiring exclusive content. they do have a player, you could say. Yeah. Do you think they're a serious player, Ashley?

I do. I do. Like, for example, I listened to the show 9-12 when it came out, and they did a thing where, well, what they've been doing mostly. Like, that one was where you can binge it all on Amazon music and that, or you could wait to get it week by week everywhere else. But Amazon music, instead of going full exclusive like Spotify, has instead been signing deals with people like my favorite murder.

and smartless where it's a week-long exclusivity window or how I built this is the most recent one. So I think that's really smart because they get the best of both worlds. If you are a diehard fan, you'll come that week early and you'll use Amazon music. If you're not, you weren't going to come ever. So they get to benefit with you as an app

to get you as an ad. You're listening to ads everywhere else and they're making money off those ads. So yeah, Amazon is making... We almost did that deal with how we survive, yeah. Yeah. interesting. We should talk after this. I've had Amazon

people. I mean, I've had everybody reach out. Amazon reached out at some point and I just didn't understand the offering yet, like exactly what the value prop was. I mean, I think that hybrid exclusivity is super smart. It doesn't seem to be getting a ton of traction so far, but again,

it's like pretty early and Amazon has, I mean, I guess the fundamental question is like, same with Google and Apple, right? If this isn't your core business, are you going to be able to devote the time to really make get the Spotify killer? So the thing that's interesting about Amazon is they own all the Alexa devices. And during the whole Rogan scuff up like with everything that happened with Rogan over the past few weeks, Spotify, I had a leaked internal town hall transcript. And in that, Daniel Eck explained why Spotify signed Joe Rogan and got into the exclusives game. And he specifically says it is because

of hardware partnerships. They needed leverage in those negotiations. So, you know, Amazon could remove Spotify. Yes. They mentioned Tesla. They mentioned Amazon and they mentioned Google. So just using Amazon and is an example. If I want to play a podcast and they don't have Spotify, but I listen to Joe Rogan, I'm going to be angry at Amazon and be like, hey, I use my Alexa and I want to listen to Joe Rogan. This is leverage for Spotify to be like, see, you have to keep us on Alexa. But you could see how Amazon has this huge advantage, which is that if I say any other

podcast that want to listen to. They can just play it from Amazon music because presumably you're a prime member. And you're just in their world already. It just gives them that. It just makes sense for them to have podcasts there. Yeah. Who's not in podcasting now, Ashley, that people are buzzing about might dip their toe. I noticed Kara Swisher did for HBO, like one of these like, you know, talking debt kind of things for secession. So that was interesting. And then I watched a show called Insecure, which just had season finale. and they did a, like, wine, you know, kind of wrap up where Issa Ra would, you know, have a glass of wine with one of the producers and talk about the show. I found it actually very compelling these products if you're into the show because the shows are complex.

So HBO Max seems like they're dipping their toe. Who's a wildcard here? And do you hear any buzz about anybody hiring for podcast positions that you're like, whoa, why are they hiring for podcast positions? Like your little catch on the YouTube? Yeah, I mean, the companies, so just to like finish your thought, yeah, like, HBO and Netflix, the streaming platforms are all investing in podcasts. They have hired people to do that. You have all the major tech platforms playing in the South.

Facebook is supposedly doing something here. Amazon, Google, Spotify, blah, blah, Apple. The one that I'm kind of watching a bit is the music labels. Oh, really? Like Sony and Universal Warner. They have teens, but I'm more, I'm kind of curious how music labels are notoriously great at getting money out of streaming platforms. So I'm very curious if they're in this for podcasts to be free or how they are thinking about,

I mean, we're seeing this with comedy right now. Like there's a movement in the legal world to get comedians paid like songwriters are paid like for the material from streaming platforms. So there's kind of this movement around spoken word royalties. And I am curious if the music labels are playing a super long game here and thinking about podcast is like some kind of spoken word royalty payment thing. Oh, I see. They want to get their clause into that so that every time it's played, they get a mechanical

or something. I like that. Yeah, I'm just thinking through it. Like, I don't know. This is just me being like, I'm kind of curious. How much time have you wasted managing your company's money? Come on, we know it's too much. Well, Mercury is here and it lets you manage your money the same way you manage your

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if they just raised $100 million? Oh, Luminary. Were they the ones who raised $100 million and it just didn't work? And they were like trying to charge $15 for. There was two. A hundred different podcasts. Yeah, Luminary was one that did. No, it's Luminary in Himalaya.

Himalaya is the one from China. And then Luminary was the one that was, yeah, like VC funded. Netflix. Oh, podcast. Yeah, subscriptions. K-1 price, get everything. They still exist. They're partners with Apple, which I think has been really good for them.

But, yeah, it's a little unclear what's going on there. Oh, right. They had, what's his name, the comedian there, under the skin. Russell Brand. They had Russell Brand. So that was super frustrating. They still do. Well, no, I would see a clip of Russell Brand, and I would want to listen to his old,

because sometimes he gets, I find him very entertaining, and sometimes he gets a good guest, and I see a clip of it on YouTube in my stream, because he's in my Algo. And I'm like, how do I listen to this? And it's like, they play seven minutes and like, oh, if you want to go listen to the rest of my pod, go go go to the Luminary. And I'm like, yeah, and you know what? Too many choices. I'm just not going to listen to it.

I think this is what the future of podcast is going to be. These people are these exclusive deals are going to realize after they secure the bag and they get a little bit of money, it's really about maximizing listeners and because of relevance and the people who come to podcasting have an ego. You know,

I mean, this is where YouTube, if YouTube really, really gets serious about it, since they already have creators, they have massive distribution. Everybody goes to YouTube or everything. Like YouTube could just stop,

and frankly, I would be delighted to have somebody come and stop this kind of exclusivity bucketing trend in its tracks because I don't, it's not good for audiences and it's not. So either YouTube should get

super serious about podcasting and just like shut the down or somebody's going to come along and be the cable TV of podcasts. Like, sell me the bundle, I guess, because I don't want to have to like have Luminary and have Amazon and have Spotify and have this and that, right? Like, you as a user, like a listener, that's one whole separate thing of just like, oh, I don't want to go to 15

different apps just to hear the shows I want to hear. But then you as a podcast, there's a whole different struggle where it Kind of like what Jason is talking about. If you can't just use your one RSS feed, press one button, it goes everywhere. You're instead going to have so much more manual labor of collecting all your stats from all the different platforms, uploading your show to all the different platforms, making sure QA, like if you do ad-free stuff, like making sure there is no ads in there. So I'm thinking about this also from a labor perspective.

Totally. That is like a really great, great point. We started experimenting with a Patreon because we have people like, hey, can I get an ad-free version? I'll pay you for it. I'm like, okay, we'll try doing a Patreon. And we produce so much content, you know, five days, six days a week now. Like, uh, you know, like, are people going to pay for it without ads or pay for an extra 20 minutes? Like, it's the amount of work it took, you know, some editors got to spend two hours managing it.

Then some marketing person's got to manage it. It just adds so much complexity. And that's, you know, was my message to the anchor folks. It's like, please do not add complexity to what we're doing. We got to do clips. We got to book guests. Like, don't make our lives harder. Uh, just because you want to, you know,

know, get your paws into here and try to get a stranglehold on stuff. It's, it's, it's, it's, is really annoying. But I could see YouTube being a big win. I agree.

Like, they, if they really took this seriously and they just, actually, there's a really easy way for them to take this seriously. They should just put podcasts along the left hand side. And when they have trending, they should have a podcast tab.

And just by doing that, all the podcasts are like, well, I got to be on the, I got to be on the ranking. So if they did their own podcast ranking charts, just copy that. YouTube and everybody will come running.

So whoever's not publishing their full podcast of YouTube will absolutely come running. The second there's a tech and a finance and a comedy ranking, they'll be like, and then you think about Joe Rogan's relevance, he was owning YouTube. And I think he must have lost some amount of audience by getting off of YouTube. I don't know what. There was a piece. I feel like it may have been in your publication, Ashley. Yeah, I wrote that piece.

YouTube and Gimlet. I told us. Rogan and Gimlet. It was you, right? About how the, you know, the Gimlet thing wasn't working out that well. I wrote the Rogan piece where I did a data analysis looking at the number of,

okay, so I looked at Rogan's show for like 19 months or something and all the guests that came on. I looked at how many followers these guests had on before they went on Rogan and then how many they gained a week after going on Rogan. And I saw a 50% reduction in their Twitter, like the amount of followers they gained on Twitter after he went exclusive. Makes sense.

Yeah. So the Jordan Peterson effect where he anoints somebody and they become, you know, really popular. And actually, today Bloomberg had a really interesting article about the guy who's made a full-time job recapping Rogan episodes. And he averages a million downloads a week now. And he said that his numbers skyrocketed after Rogan went to Spotify because there was such an appetite for people who don't want to just go to Spotify. So they were like, I want to know what's going on. It's really interesting. Wow.

That's some hustle. we should get that guy. Yeah, that's my prediction is Joe Rogan leaves Spotify after this deal. And then either does his own platform where it brings a bunch of people together or he just goes super distribution again and then brings his ads back in house and doubles his audience again. Well, listen, Ashley, you've been great. Thanks so much for all of your time and for writing all these great pieces

and keeping us informed. You really got yourself plugged into this audio space and we appreciate it. Yeah, it's great talking to you guys. We should all talk about podcasts more. That's in everyone else. So, yes. How is it in fact in journalism? It's like now if you are going to work at like the verge or Vox or BuzzFeed, is it like,

oh, you don't do podcasting your second class citizen? And then the people who have podcasts become like these elite people in the organization because, you know, they're more forward facing. Yeah, I think, I mean, everyone, not everyone, we can't speak for everyone. A lot of people would like a podcast probably. But, I mean, just because even if you were someone with a big following, it doesn't always translate to success on a podcast. So I think it's always very much.

having a really good idea and I feel like anyone could have that. Interesting. Yeah. It seems to me like there's been a bifurcation of like journalists, like people who are good on camera and podcasting are just becoming super valuable to these, you know, brands and they're just getting compensated differently. Like, you know, Kara Swisher being the ultimate example of it, like where she can just dictate her terms or Molly Wood, you know, like there's a class of folks who are just, you know, they transcend journalism now. Yeah, the star journalists and influencers.

God help us. Well, I mean, look at the New York Times. Like, their number one podcaster, I believe, is Kara, and she's not an employee. Like, they can't make her an employee, and she's got sway. And they're just grabbing up everybody and turning them into a podcaster. Oh, yeah, they got Ezra Klein from Vox, right? I was going to say, I feel like Ezra Klein just got super mad somewhere out in the universe because it was like, come on.

But yeah, very similar, very similar model. All right. Thanks, Ashley, thanks. Thanks, thanks. Thanks, thanks talking to all. Ashley Carmen, just dropping great knowledge, as always. Great guess, great guess. And now we're going to toss to the 10 pitches and the feedback we gave.

Myself, Molly, Jackie, Mike Savino, the new president of launch. And Charlie Cuddy, who runs Founder U, did just an amazing job coaching these founders and teaching them what it takes to get to product market fit. These are very nascent startups. They're very early. But if you're thinking about starting a company, this is how it starts. And so these companies are going to be applying to go to accelerators. that's how early they are,

and we really loved hosting them for our 12-week Founder University course. Enjoy the pitches. So Charlie, let's get started. We're going to see five companies in a row, two minutes each. I'm going to ask Jackie, Molly, and Mike and myself to each pick their number one

in each cohort. And the number one is the one they think is got the greatest chance. This is the lens I'd like the four of us to look at it through, of getting into our accelerator and then eventually getting a seed round completed. So those two things,

being able to get into an accelerator, Hopefully ours, but could be any, and then eventually raise a seed round of a million dollars. So that's kind of the idea. Who's ready for that seed round or accelerator check? Are we ready, Charlie? We are ready. Seth with Gifting is up first here. All right, here we go. Hi, I'm Seth Brown and my company is Gifting. Gifting's an on-demand gift-giving marketplace. Meet Alex. Alex lives in New York and just remember today's her brother's birthday. But Brett lives in Florida, so what can she get him and will it even arrive in time? Luckily for Alex, there's gifting. Let's see how it works. Alex enters in Brett interests, he loves music and electronics. From there, our machine learning algorithm analyzes his interest and provides a single curated list of items available in his area. Had Brett been a

gifting customer, Alex would have seen his wish list pop up when searching for recommendations. Each gifting order is accompanied by a digital card or premium video message, which we believe is a real game changer. And to top it off, all this can be delivered in as little as two hours. As for Brett's gift, that's accompanied with a text message containing his personalized greeting, similar to the email that some members of the lunch team just received. Brett can confirm his delivery or reschedule, leaving them both happy customers. I conducted research with over 2,500 consumers like Alex and compared it to the competitive landscape.

We found there really wasn't an app that checked all the boxes until now. Our go-to-market strategy includes a localized consumer campaign, retail partnerships targeting inventory from over 800 brick-and-mortar stores in our launch market of South Florida, a product built for expansion and made operational by farming out our deliveries. We built a pre-launched community of over 11,000 members. Once launched, we'll focus on our 2X growth model where we'll incentivize every gifting recipient like Brett to becoming a gifting customer like Alex. We're targeting an ARR of 10 million in 2024 and 100 million by the end of 2025. Traditional gift giving costs $20 can take 43 minutes and not

knowing what to get could be frustrating. With gifting, you can save close to 20%. It could be done in a fraction of the time with access to personalized gift recommendations. Our team has experienced grown companies from startup through exit, resulting in combined sales of nearly $6 billion. Gifting is an on-demand gift-giving marketplace. We obsess over delivering the perfect gifts you don't have to. Thank you. Nice work, Seth.

You want to go ahead and stop sharing your screen. We'll move on to Teresa. Ready, go. Perfect. Hi, I'm Theresa. I'm the CEO and Curfund of True You. We personalize and digitized breathing training to help people with longer and better. Breathing is the foundation of life and we do it more than 20,000 times a day.

Yet 9 out of 10 people do it wrongly, and this can lead to deadly chronic diseases, the number one cause of death worldwide, lost years of life, and for companies, financial losses of millions of US dollars per year. That's how we developed a personalized and digitally training as a solution. Let me show you how this works. At the bottom of the screen, people get a prompt to inhale or exhale. That's the breathing training part. They then blow onto the microphone of the smartphone or headset.

When they follow the rhythm correctly, they steer the object on the screen in real time. They're literally blowing up a balloon. We offer this as holistic breathing training to businesses. We integrate the training into the browser. We have an analytics dashboard. We offer coaching and webinars. And people can train their breath anytime and anywhere because we also have a mobile app. We compete with expensive hardware-based breathing devices, human analog, not-scalable breathing

trainers and existing meditation and lifestyle apps where there's either no clear breathing focus or no real-time interaction with the user. To show your breathing training care ever works, because it's sticky, it's fun. we've literally millions of ways of doing the breathing animation. We don't need any additional hardware. Just a regular smartphone or headset is enough. Last but not least, it functions, it works. It's based on more than five years of research

at leading universities like MIT or ETH Zurich. We follow a bottom-up B2B SARS model, but we charge private customers $5 per month and business customers $10 dollars per month. We focus on B2B clients first and plan to have a revenue of $50 million by the end of 2025. We currently have 250 better testers for the B2C, and we have acquired our three.

first B2P client, a corporate global insurance company where we will integrate into their corporate wellness platform. They already have a million active users there. We have further in advance negotiations with another global insurance company. A potential other client of ours says that our breathing training is so easy and fun. It's like Candy Crush for Health. As it's me, I did my PhD at ETH Zurich and MIT in Digital Health, David, who worked for top-tier strategy consulting and fitness startups, and our CETO, Stefan, who did his PhD at ETH Zurich in machine learning and quantum chemistry. Thank you for attention. We assure you and to digitize and personalized breathing training.

Excellent. Nice job, Teresa. Harry, why don't you go ahead and share your screen? You're up next. Ready? Go. Hi, everyone. I'm Harry. The founder of Taco and AI Conversation Hub that manages all of the professional communications in one place. Me, Joey. Joey's a VC who plays different roles. Jerry needs to juggle between Gmail, Slack, on LinkedIn on a daily basis. All Joey wants is a single interface that consolidates all of the messages in one place. And now with Taco, he can't. Joey simply uses one tab to connect any account from any platform. He can then customize the connection details.

Taco will then spend up an LP model in the backend to figure out what's important. Joey can then directly reply within the app or go straight to the specific Gmail or Slack. Taco then plans everything on the trackbook list. Joey's time and mine are saved. We are a consumer subscription model and we charge $10 per month. Two weeks ago, we launched our private beta and now we have 150 users with 100% week-over-week growth while spending $0 on marketing. We've received positive feedback on our AI algorithm, unique product positioning, and also our UI.

We outcompete power products like superhuman by integrating with more platforms, and we out-compete all-in-one chats by having an AI-driven backend. We've been growing from free high-converting channels. These channels drive organic word-of-mouth growth. We've also been growing our brand and community awareness by issuing membership NFTs. This year, we plan to penetrate the entrepreneur group and grow our MAU to 100,000. Next year, we'll move to B2B with a product-like growth fashion. And we are the team to do this.

I ran into the problem firsthand when I was studying AI and LP at UChicago. My co-founder has a background of building consumer-facing tech product at Amazon. And once again, I'm Harry. This is Taco, your AI Conversation Hub. Thank you. Excellent job. Harry. We'll shift to Tracy.

Ready, go. Hi, I'm Tracy. the founder of Term Payments, the payment processor that allows a customer to shop online and pay in person. Because people like Ari don't trust websites with his card information or only has cash. But with Term, he can select a pay in person and receive a QR code by email or text with a link to a map that shows the closest payment location to complete his purchase. Term makes money by charging a vendors 3.6% to process payments and a one-third split of the collection fee with physical locations.

but we also give customers the option to have the full term payments app with additional features for our annual membership of $28. With strategic partners like Strikes, spare cash, and Green Dot, Term will soon be able to serve our wait list of over 200 shopping customers and 17 e-commerce stores, online marketplaces, and SaaS technology companies registered and waiting on standby to use Term as their payment processor. Our closest competition is e-banks, PaySafe, Cash App, and Amazon. e-banks and paysafe are outside the U.S. collecting over $1 billion in annual in-person cash payments and the U.S. companies are racing to develop and launch. These companies are great, but term payments can beat them to market by introducing ourselves to our customers where they are with posters at grocery stores, check cashing centers, billboards at bus stops and train stations, and social media outlets.

We may be starting as a payment button on e-commerce websites, but we'll grow to process payments for utilities, school tuition, vacations, and even mortgages, because in the U.S., 35% of all transactions are still done in cash. And when you expand to the rest of the world, that number jumps to over 80% making it a trillion-dollar opportunity. To reach our first milestone of 10 million in annual revenue, we need to process approximately $1.5 million per day. And to get to $100 million in annual revenue, we have to process almost $9 million per day. Our team is made up of seasoned veterans of retail management, corporate sales, logistics, and operations and software engineering. Term is the bridge that connects the digital and physical payments world. Thank you.

Awesome job. Tracy, thank you. And we'll go one more for this first group of five. Chase, ready? Go. Hi, I'm Chase, founder of Fix 6. We're measuring the world's carbon to bring more people into the carbon economy. People like Jesus, who wants to bring his reforestation projects to a carbon-offset marketplace. In order to do this, he needs a measurement, reporting, and verification solution. Currently, the cost of these solutions limit the number and types of projects that he can start. Fix6 offers an affordable and scalable solution to this problem. To work with us, Hesuzus just uploads the geometry of the project. We then go and gather years worth of satellite data to train a scientific model, which calculates the water, energy, and carbon budget of his land.

We use this model to measure carbon sequestration, which is then reported to carbon-offset marketplaces, allowing Jesus access to the capital that he needs. We currently have two customers and unpaid pilots with more in the pipeline. We're also partnering with carbon-offset marketplaces to offer a scalable MRV solution. We have a SaaS model charging per acre per year, with many of these projects spend multiple years and up to a decade. One thing that sets us apart is a wide number of practices we support by monitoring both forest and crop lands. This allows us to be an MRP provider for nearly every acre of land on the globe. We have seen intense interest from people in the regenerative finance and regenerative agriculture communities,

as well as marketplaces looking for a scalable MRV solution. There's also the opportunity to expand into new verticals as more natural capital is backed with monetary capital. The carbon offset markets are expected to at least quadruple by the end of the decade, which each of these tons being backed by an MRV solution. For the land-based practices at FixxS covers, up to roughly 850, million acres of land will be put in practice by the end of this decade. That represents an $850 million tam at our dollar per acre pricing. The team is me at the moment, but we have a unique advantage since I have a PhD and peer-reviewed

research and can create scalable solutions for measuring carbon and water budgets. Because of this, we're positioning Fix 6 to get more people into the carbon economy by measuring the world's carbon. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Chase. We're going to go ahead and stop sharing your screen. Jason, there's your first group of five. Very strong presentations, all seemingly real businesses that customers could be delighted by and spend money with. To recap for Jackie, Mike, and Molly, we have Company 1, Gifting. It's an app that lets gift givers quickly send memorable gifts on demand.

Company 2, Choju, is a breathing app that competes with Com, Apple Watch, and some other services, $10 per user in the enterprise to help you. learn to breathe better and reduce stress. Company 3, Taco, which is an AI conversation hub that consolidates your Slack, LinkedIn, and other messaging platforms into one apps, ostensibly so you could triage it better, I think, with some AI doing something in the back end, but I wasn't clear on that, 150 users in beta, and then you have term payments,

which allows you to shop online pay in person with a membership fee of $20 and some service fees. The audience for this, I believe, would be the unbanked. And company five, fix six, which is measuring the world's carbon footprints by analyzing land. I think using computer vision to figure out its carbon footprint, cost a dollar an acre. And I think MRV stands for measurement reporting and verification. So I'll start with you, Jackie. When you look at these five companies, which one stands out to you that if it was in the accelerator, investors would want to take a follow-up meeting and then subsequently would have the best

chance at raising that million dollar seed round. Which one? I can only pick one. But you could take us through a dog process of your top two or three. Such a drawing cohort. Oh my gosh. You tell us the two or three you're particularly, you're narrowed it down to and then which one is the best in why? Sure, sure, sure. So I think if I were to do a one, two, I'll do two. Okay. So for me, sure. Let's all do two. Okay. Let's do two. Thank you. So two for me would be fix six. It's such an important issue. You know, it's just, and I love this, this angle on it. And my one would be Taco because, you know, it's such a cool space.

And there are so many tools now. And no one's really figured out how to consolidate all these platforms. So we would love to dive into that product a bit more. Mike, which one do you think could get a million dollar sheet around if we're going through an So my two favorites to this cohort were shows you and turn paper. I think for me, the number one was term payments. I think she's identified a very, very interesting space that, frankly, I was not aware of.

That's fascinating to think into that deep deeper. And I think for us, you know, FinTech is a big focus. Choju is in the consumer space, which is also an area for us. So I think both of those would be the winners for the accelerator. Okay, which one is your number one? You said term payments, yeah. Okay. And Molly, if you looked at these two,

based on your tremendous knowledge of the technology industry and your growing knowledge of investing, which too. I have a feeling I know which one you like best, personal. I mean, I think you think I know, you know, but you don't. Number two for me is Choju, actually, particularly because you're in talks with a global insurance company. I think there's a huge opportunity there

for businesses who are investing in wellness for lots of reasons. But number one for me is term payments. I do think that that identifies a real need and also that Tracy did such a great job of exactly at the point when I was thinking, wait, do people really want this of saying people really want this? And here's why. Great. And then for me, I went, again, not my personal feelings, but what I think would clear

market with investors in the seed community. I think Fix 6 would be number one because it feels like a software platform doing computer visualization. It feels like it's technically sophisticated, which makes it defensible, hard to do, and that there'll be a growth market there, kind of like you're skating to where the puck is. And that I struggled with my number two, I think all four of them could have been number two.

But there was something about gifting that I felt like the founder understood his market, had a level of passion for this idea. And I'm not sure it's polished enough yet, but I could see it getting super polished and taking off in a metropolitan area where people might really value gifting, and if it had very unique things.

So that would be my number two. I could see it actually working. So great start. One of the interesting things here was you saw different perspectives, right? And so that's one important thing for all founders to understand. You don't have to win over every investor. You need to win over one investor. Let's go to the next five companies, Charlie.

Great job so far. Yeah, absolutely. Graham, why don't you go ahead and share your screen and we'll jump into remote space. Ready? Go. All right. Everybody, my name is Graham Carrow, the co-founder and CEO of Remote Space, a shared space remote team to talk to whoever, whenever.

How does it work? Meet Eva. She's a product manager at Apple. She works in a large organization that uses remote space to remove barriers between cross-functional teams. Today, she has a question for Stella, a software engineer running a sprint, so she joins Remote Space to ask them. Eva joins, first, Eva accesses the spaces within our network, and specifically the product space. She discovers that Stella is unavailable and she sees Ken and Erica talking already, so she decides to talk to Zane instead. Eva joins his space and drags her avatar over to Zane to start a conversation separate from others in the space and without ever needing to send a calendar invite. She learns from Zane that Sam and marketing really needs her help and asks her to join the marketing space.

Eva says, sure. Eva accesses the marketing space, joins a space, then moves her avatar over to Sam and solves our problem. Remote space removed barriers for Eva's team and save valuable time when working on their next product release. The business model is Frimium SaaS. It starts free for networks up to 10. Paid starts at $10 per user per month, and it gets cheaper as the networks get larger. Traction bottom-up customer pipeline is 121 email sign-ups to date with the logos on the right-hand side, no paid customers yet. There are four main competitors in the space for remote space is uniquely positioned to be professional for enterprise, simple and efficient without distraction, three-step onboarding, and quick navigation to other spaces.

Our go-to market is organic network effects, peer engagement, and paid advertising. Our five-year vision is to be the global leader in remote work engagement. And our journey to 100 million ARR is 125,000 paying customers to get to 10 million and a million and a quarter to get to 100 million. This is our team. I'm the CEO, three-time founder, six-year-s experience and consulting product and design. Retent Shavetes is CTO, two-time founder, five-year's experience, and soft for engineering. That is remote space, shared space, remote teams and talk to whoever, whenever. Thank you.

Thanks, Graham. We'll move right on to Andrew. Hi, I'm Andrew, founder of Savvy Team, the platform that helps you create career paths and upskilling opportunities for your employees. Meet Ran. She's head of engagement marketing at Airbnb, and she aspires to become a global head of engagement marketing. She's managed by Brian. Brian has a one-on-one with Rand and then creates a career path for her. In this case, we're going to edit the one that he already started. It's a typical job description, which allows him to put the required skills, competencies, and outcomes required for that position, and it has a recommendation engine in case he's not sure who to give this path to.

Once she's given the path, Ran is able to designate that, her interest towards it for her dream role. From there, she's able to decide maybe she doesn't want to do that next. She wants to make her next path the National Head of Engagement Marketing, which gives her time to pick up special projects so that she can do a few things. One, prove that she has certain skills. Two, upskill herself so she can be ready for that position. And three, give her and Brian conviction through updates on her progress. We charge $50 a month currently after a five-seat trial, but we're planning on quickly. switching over to a per user per month subscription.

We've already onboarded three companies, and they're currently creating ladders for their employees. We have four companies in the queue and a handful of larger companies that we're working through on the pipeline. Two of our companies switch from our biggest competitor, Ladis Grow. The major difference that our customers are seeing is that between us and Ladis Grow is that we actually focus on the person, the employee first, and let them, the employees take control of their own destiny and their careers.

We currently are doing cold outreach right now through email and LinkedIn, but I plan on switching over to leaning more into my growth background and trying a lot more different tactics. I'm currently a solo founder. I'm in on deck looking for a co-founder. I founded a company called someone new, which is in a similar space, and I've led growth for companies like job today and warmly. The major thing that's next for us is we're going to start with peer mentorship to help match employees for upskilling and career development, reducing friction so that managers can create paths easier and going after enterprise customers because they feel this pain the most. We're savvy team, the platform that helps you with career paths and upskilling opportunities for

employees. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you, Andrew. Great job. Monica, you're up next. Ready, go. Great. Hi, I'm Monica with Gaon, which helps travelers, which helps people to travel more lightly and sustainably by providing locally sourced clothing for rent at the traveler's destination. We're currently have beta testers in the Bay Area and our first trial customers were Becky and Bill, who are semi-retired musicians. and Airbnb hosts. So with Becky and Bill, we collected their information. They're sizing their preferences. And about five days before they landed in the Bay Area,

we presented them with some options for their nine-day stay. Becky and Bill really enjoyed the service of Ga'an, and they shared this picture of some suitcases. They were very happy not to be schlepping themselves. Ga'an is a marketplace where we will take care of. of logistics and cleaning and hold some limited inventory for basic capsule clothing and also sign up boutiques, department stores, brands, and peer-to-peer creators who might have some really unique pieces in their personal collection. We are taking some waitless customers, and not all

of them currently are traveling to the Bay Area quite yet, and we have one who's upcoming in March. There's, of course, rent the runway and a couple of smaller companies that are designed for travelers, specifically, but none of them source at the local destination. They ship from their headquarters and also currently offer only women's clothing. Our go-to-market plan is to go city by city and actually drill down airport by airport, and here's a quick snapshot of what an opportunity at SFO might look like. This is our plan to hopefully crawl, walk, and run to $100 million in annual revenue, which requires about 2,600 daily deliveries.

And here I am and have some co-founders that I am currently recruiting, almost founder official, not quite yet. Awesome. Thank you so much, Monica. Great job. And Scott, ready? Go. Hey there. I'm Scott, founder of Timewall, the legacy platform to capture family.

memories with their voice. You can upload photos or ask a question, then record your loved one's thoughts in their own voice. So meet Jenna. She has a lot of great memories with her dad. And as he ages, Jenna wants him to capture his stories. But the places they store photos don't make this easy. So she chose Time Well because it's super simple and will save stories in his voice. And Jenna now has a single place to save answers to questions and stories behind photos. It helps her whole family get to know him better. And Time Well, was a B2C SaaS with three subscription plans and a flexible one-time payment plan, all starting with a 14-day free trial.

I launched on January 10th of this year with over 50 people on the early access list, and I have 15 active users with forward paid accounts. And the consistent feedback is that it's really easy, even for Richard, who is 90 years old. And there are a number of strong legacy platforms already focused on capturing loved one's stories, but my ultimate goal is to make it ridiculously easy for people like Jenna to record dad's voice. And I'm targeting others like Jenna and her dad. They believe memories are worth saving. And I'm focusing on making collaboration sticky by showing value at life event like a wedding. In the next two years, we focused on distribution and expanding my team. And the following years

on expanding my platform. The market size is over $30 million. And I'm setting myself apart by focusing on life events and scanning businesses that will channel photos into the Timewell platform. And the team is me. I have over 15 years experience in design, branding, and photography, and I'm obsessed with creating great product experiences. So thanks for looking at Time Well, where you can capture family memories with their voice. Excellent. Thanks, Scott.

I've got two minutes for you, Regina. Ready? Go. Hi, I'm Regina, CEO of Inocuous AI. Our mission is to help companies productionize AI faster for less and providing a no-code DevOps as a service platform for AI developers. Meet Joe. He's a data scientist.

As a data scientist, Joe, is great at building algorithms. But to build an AI product in the cloud, he has to read through tons of documentation and spend many months figuring out DevOps work. The solution is in Akama's AI. A cloud platform for AI developers wanting to keep a small AI team so it's more manageable, scalable, and affordable. It is easy to use even without going through lots of documentation. It makes it fast and easy to onboard new data scientists.

When Joe uses this platform, he can focus on what he loves, which is creating algorithms. With Inocuous book, Joe can now bring models to production rapidly without the need for a large DevOps team to support him. There are multiple revenues opportunities, and the main one is an upcharge on infrastructure spend. Others include storage fees and more. Each customer represents north of $370,000 in annual revenue. Unlike competitors that can only take in tabula data, Inocchio's book is more flexible as it can take in both structured and unstructured data. The no-code platform makes it effortless to use in comparison to competitors.

Our first 10 million will be from well-funded U.S.-based startups building AI products. We scale to 100 million by expanding to larger enterprises incorporating AI into their products. The vision is to ultimately become the next AI-based cloud provider. Right now, we're in private beta with one customer on a free trial that has expressed an interest in a paid pilot. I'm a second-time co-founder with two successful exits in over 20 years business experience. My co-founder has over 10 years AI experience and is a thought leader in the data science community. We are innocuous AI. We help companies improve the time to value for their AI investments without no-code DevOps as a service platform for AI developers like Joe.

Excellent. Thanks, Regina. And stop sharing your screen. There's our group of five for you, Jason. Okay, well done. We had remote workspace and old school palace like 2D chat space for business. We had Inoculus AI, which we just heard from a no-code DevOps platform for AI. We had Savvy Team, a SaaS platform that gives people a career path,

improve your skills, upskill yourself. And then we had gone or gone, which is to rent local clothes when traveling to a location. You travel lighter because clothes are waiting for you. And then finally, company 10, the fifth in this cohort, time well. Capture family memories by adding voice. to pictures. Let's go on a reverse order. Molly, did you have a

favorite two that you think could clear market and raise that million dollar round after going through an accelerator? The lens in which we're looking through. I just want three. I know. That's why it's two. Wow.

You can give a honorable mention. All right. You can give three honorable mentions. Honorable mention to go on because I especially like the hyperlocal part of local closed rental. My number two is savvy team. I think there is such a use for tracking that specific.

You don't have to rely on just people and their feelings about you. You literally have like milestones on the back end. That's outstanding. And then number one, so glad that Regina recovered. It's innocuous AI for me. That is incredibly complicated. And I hope you can actually pull that off. But if you can, people are going to pay a lot for that.

Okay, Mikey. I think you went next. So my two had a common theme. I thought both remote space and Timewell had really great design. I think both products visually looked really interesting. And that stuck out for me. But my number one was Timewell. I just think the market's bigger.

I would be a little concerned on Remote Space competing with the Flats and the teams of the world. So Timewell is the number one and Remote Space number two. Great. Jackie. Yeah, this is tough. my honorable mention would be innocuous, which I think looks really cool. I didn't quite understand what the product was,

so I'd want to dig into that, but it looks like it's very cool. And then my two, I'm actually like Mike here, the same remote space for me was two, and Time Well was one. Great. For me,

this was a really interesting group, some very creative ideas. I'll give an honorable mention to Gone, which I found fascinating and scary and creative. like I'm going to show up somewhere and I'll have no clothes with me and then maybe I'll have clothes, but it'll be sustainable, maybe I take some back,

I buy them. Anyway, there's something there. And it just, you could tell everybody's attention was like, huh, something interesting there. But my number two was savvy team.

It does seem like they understand the space and, you know, enterprise is like planting seeds in a farm, you know, and then like, you know, building consumer products is like finding a needle in a hay snack. It's like really much harder.

Or finding a truffle maybe would be a really good analogy. So like you could be a truffle under it. Not easy or you could like plant seeds and build enterprise software. So that's my number two. My number one, I was absolutely taken and inspired by Time Well because I just thought, why isn't there an audio feature built into all photos where you could give an audio caption? So I think there's a chance to make a standard here. I think there's a chance to make a new media format.

I thought, you know, people on TikTok are doing kind of reaction videos, so maybe you could actually have grandma's camera on, let her talk about the photo and who's in it and what happened that day in 1972, and then save it for all time. So I love this archive, this kind of thing, or maybe saving it for your kids. Hey, we went skiing this day. I'm going to give this to you on your 21st birthday when I took you skiing when you were five years old. That's immediately what I thought of was like taking some of these photos and putting my memories on it now and then time bombing it to my kids in. Five years. So just wonderful ideas. So time was my one.

Savvy team's my two. Cannot wait to spend more time with each of you. We'll be in touch and get to know our team members. And entrepreneurship is really hard. But as you can see, it gets a lot easier when you've got a tribe and you got a group of people you can do it with. So keep building that tribe and keep helping each other. You all get there together. Nobody gets there alone.

And we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.